Black Dahlia White Rose: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Gazing up at the tiny damp eyes, the tiny beak moving soundlessly, as if its terror has made it mute—and my heart begins to beat rapidly, and my wings—(wings! suddenly I realize what is sprouting from my shoulders)—and now I see a fattish woman standing about twelve feet below me and peering up at me, quizzical and curious rather than concerned—I am crying Oh please help me! I am one of you! I don’t know what this terrible thing is, that has happened to me but—I am a living thing, I am one of you . . .

  Unable to stop the agitation of my wings, I am flying about in terror—striking the ugly, unyielding ceiling—ricocheting against the windows—and the ledge—there is a ventilator humming within, a ghastly grinding sound—in the midst of my terror another woman comes to observe, eating an apple—so acute is my eyesight, I can see saliva gleaming on this woman’s lips—in her eyes a reflection of mild concern—so very mild, it’s like a flickering candle seen at a distance; beyond this woman are rows of seats of which most are occupied—there are the U.S. soldiers in their bizarre jungle-uniforms—some glance up frowning, or smiling—faint distracted smiles; a few have seen me, or the blurred beating of wings that I have become. Help me! I want to go home! I don’t belong here, I live in—but my tiny trilling voice can’t accommodate multisyllabic words. I am one of you—I am a living creature—help me out of this terrible place—I was a traveler like you—a human being like you—my flight to Chicago was delayed for forty minutes—and then for another forty minutes—and then—somehow—this has happened—this, to which I can give no name—this curse! Please hear me! Please help me! I have done nothing to deserve this punishment—I am innocent—I cannot even remember my “sins”—my “crimes”—I may have believed that I was an extraordinary individual but the fact is, I was utterly ordinary—I am utterly ordinary—I am blameless—it is a terrible injustice that I have been singled out like this—please, you must help me! Don’t just smile inanely at me or look away, bored—help me! It is a mistake that I am here trapped against plate-glass windows—flinging myself against plate-glass windows—so yearning to escape into the open air, to freedom, my tiny heart is near to bursting! Take me to my home—when they see me, they will recognize me—there are those who love me—they will know who I am—I must consume food at once, I am starving—my little sparrow-wings, my tiny organs, my heart, my teaspoon of blood must be nourished—I am so very cold, I am shivering convulsively—if I don’t consume food—just a few crumbs—please, just a few crumbs—I will begin to die within a few minutes—my organs will begin to shut down—my panicked-darting eyes will begin to close over, and my vision will become occluded—my wings which I had believed would beat forever, will slow—not one of you is starving—not one of you is beginning to shut down, and die—you have no right to smile at the suffering of a bird in the final minutes of its life—you have no right to ignore me for I am a very beautiful white-crowned sparrow with elaborately patterned wings of white, brown, black and rust-colored curved feathers—

  —I am more beautiful than any of you crude, wingless, earthbound creatures—I am as deserving of life as you!—more deserving than you!—I deserve better than this nightmare-curse: a random death among strangers.

  Except—am I going to be rescued? Has someone called for help, and help has come? Eagerly my eyes take in an unexpected sight below: two men in work-uniforms—quick-striding, efficient and seemingly well-practiced—are approaching, at last. One has a stepladder and a small net with a three-foot handle, the other a wicked-looking broom.

  Roma!

  The Hotel Bellevesta glittered by night like a multitiered wedding cake and by day gleamed in the sun—dazzling-white stucco, marble, and stained glass framed, on its ground floor, by banks of gorgeous crimson and purple bougainvillea. The original building had been the private residence—the “palazzo”—of a seventeenth-century cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church but in more recent centuries had been allowed to deteriorate; now totally renovated, and refurbished, as a smart new five-star tourist-hotel, it was an architectural gem amid the mixture of staid old historic buildings and expensive boutiques, designer shops, and beauty salons on the fashionable Via di Ripetta.

  Their suite was on the seventh floor, at the rear of the hotel as they’d requested. From one of the windows they could see, across the Piazza del Popolo, the tall stark beautifully silhouetted cypresses of the Borghese Gardens less than a quarter-mile away.

  Alexis shivered with an emotion she could not have named—anticipation, apprehension. She’d seen—she was sure she’d seen—these heraldic-seeming trees in a premonitory dream of the previous night, as she’d seen an archaic obelisk resembling the monument at the center of the piazza, not clearly, but with a powerful stab of nostalgia.

  “This is wonderful, David! We’ll be happy here.”

  In other hotels, in other Italian cities, they had not always been so happy. But this was Rome, and this was the five-star Hotel Bellevesta. It would be the final hotel of their Italian trip.

  Their room was elegantly furnished, much larger than they’d expected—with dusty-rose silk wallpaper, an astonishing twelve-foot ceiling and a marble floor that exuded the coolness of centuries; a crystal chandelier, of a size disproportionate even to this large space, and not one but two French doors. Framing the wide windows were draperies of white silk and a thinner, gossamer fabric, over a dark blind designed to keep out both sunshine and the noise of street traffic; the effect, even at midday, was secluded, cave-like—a space in which one could sleep, undisturbed, or reasonably undisturbed, in the midst of the thrumming city.

  “Come look! It’s like—Venice . . .”

  The larger of the French doors opened onto a small balcony and from the balcony you could see, six floors below, a quaint cobblestone street, narrow as a lane, and the rear—fascinating in its detail, like a weatherworn topographical map—of a block of apartment buildings joined together like row houses but dissimilar in size and height and condition; one or two appeared to be vacated and shuttered, as if abandoned, while the others—so far as Alexis could see, without leaning too far over the balcony railing—were clearly lived-in, populated. The rooftops, too, were remarkably heterogeneous—some were made of ceramic tiles, of that lovely earthen-orange hue reminiscent of rooftops in Venice, while others were more rough-hewn, of some crude material like tar paper; still others had been converted into rooftop gardens with lemon trees, rosebushes, and small plants in cultivated rows, resembling a setting in a doll’s house, in miniature. There were chairs and tables precariously positioned, it seemed, at the edge of rooftops as at the edge of an abyss; there were drooping clotheslines and laundry hanging like swabs of paint in an Impressionist painting; over all hovered clusters of TV antennae like antic grave markers. Here and there were stucco huts silhouetted dramatically against the sky—and the sky above Rome, on these warm summer evenings, like the sky above Venice, resembled an El Greco sky of bruised clouds, subtly fading and melting colors. On many of the older roofs moss grew as well as grasses and even a scattering of a bluish-purple wildflower Alexis had been noticing throughout Italy, for which she knew no name—a bell-shaped cluster-flower that appeared exquisite to the eye but was in fact tough and sinewy, with surprisingly sharp thorns, as she’d discovered in the ruins of the Roman Forum on their first day of sightseeing in the city.

  So strange! Like a pueblo dwelling, in the American Southwest: many individuals crammed together in a relatively small and primitive space. The busyness of Rome, the startling modernity of Rome, seemed remote here; the alley was too narrow for traffic other than motor scooters, and there weren’t many of these, at least not that Alexis had noticed. Yet she didn’t doubt, this was truly Rome: this was the Rome in which ordinary citizens lived, oblivious to the glittery Hotel Bellevesta as the Hotel Bellevesta was oblivious to them.

  “David? Come look. The backs of these buildings—like a painting, or a fresco—fascinating . . .”

  David stepped out onto the balcony but didn’
t speak for some time. It was like him to withhold comment; he would see for himself what Alexis wanted to show him, for he wasn’t readily susceptible to others’ enthusiasms. Just as he didn’t often reply to Alexis’s remarks if he thought them naïve, banal, or self-evident—in their travels together, as in their marriage, it had come to be David’s role to hold back, to express doubt, or even skepticism, or cynicism, while Alexis maintained her girlish manner of openness, curiosity. The wife plunging head-on, hopeful; the husband thoughtful, inclined to hesitate.

  Like figures on a teeter-totter: the one who is elevated is dependent upon the one who is heavier, and grounded.

  So many ancient, heraldic and lapidary figures they’d been seeing, in the tourist-world of classical antiquity, almost Alexis could think that she had seen just this figure, carved in stone.

  “Isn’t it? The peeling walls, the beautiful fading colors? Like Venice?”

  David leaned out over the balcony railing, just conspicuously farther than Alexis. His forehead creased in the effort to discern what there was here to be seen, if it was so very exceptional. The strange heterogeneity of stucco dwellings, the jumble of rooftops, TV antennae, part-opened windows and shuttered windows—yes, there was something beautiful about the scene, David conceded, or anyway intriguing: “Not quite like Venice since there is only one Venice but yes—very intriguing.”

  How happy it made Alexis, when her husband agreed with her! She had always deferred to him, as she had always adored him; his feeling for her was more modulated yet she didn’t doubt that he loved her, or would have said that he loved her—this was all that mattered. In their daily lives, which, in the enforced intimacy of travel, became yet more intense, no matter was too small, trivial or domestic to Alexis, to be proffered to David’s judgment; all matters seemed to her about equally crucial as if their marriage, though an established fact, was nonetheless always in doubt, depending upon her husband’s ever-shifting, ever-unpredictable assessment of her worth.

  ‘Roma.’ ”

  The word seemed magical to her, a floating sort of word, unlike the dour-sounding “Rome.”

  Through the city there pulsed a heightened energy so palpable you could nearly see, taste, touch it—but this energy, Alexis thought, was only just on the surface: beneath was a hidden subterranean world, a kind of vast cave, or catacomb, brooding and impersonal, with a far slower pulse, like the movements of glaciers, or continents. In the visible Rome, a place of elaborated encoded maps, tourist-pilgrims by the thousands drifted each day—each hour—in quest of some sort of profound, secular miracle: a succession of visions to photograph, to appropriate as experience. For the life of the senses is a continuous depthless stream—it has no accumulation, it has not even a destination; the conclusion of a life in time is of no more consequence than any preceding moment; so there is the yearning for experience—if not personal, the collective and impersonal will do.

  But this deeper Rome, this secret, dark-brooding, inward and subterranean Rome was inaccessible to the outsider, and could not be appropriated. So each evening when they returned to the Hotel Bellevesta after a long day of sightseeing they were made to feel dissatisfied, incomplete; particularly, David felt this, the suspicion of being cheated, or missing something; as if an entire page in their Rome guidebook had been torn out, to mock him despite his Nikon D300—newly purchased for this trip to Italy, after considerable research.

  “ ‘Rome.’ Not ‘Roma’—to us.”

  Alexis laughed, though David might have meant this as a rebuke. For he, too, was smiling—in his ironic way.

  On the first heady days of their trip, which began in Venice, David had taken hundreds of photographs, rapidly, his fingers moving as swiftly as his eye; there had been a grim efficiency to his picture-taking, Alexis had thought, for, with the new digital technology, in contrast to older, more calculated photography, one scarcely needed to “see,” still less to think—in theory, the photographer could photograph virtually every moment of his presence in a place, of which, later, in solitude, he could select just those few moments of worth. In this way, the photographer was postponing the very experience of his trip—by snapping pictures, he was deferring the effort of evaluation. When David showed Alexis the multiple images he’d taken on the LCD display, some of them including her, she’d been struck by how closely the pictures resembled one another, with only minute differences between them; in multiples, none had appeared particularly distinctive. “But which do you prefer?” David asked. “Which would you like me to print?” His tone was just slightly coercive, for he liked to present “choices” to Alexis as if testing her.

  Which images to print? When they were so much alike? Alexis had no idea. Yet she could not say But you’re the photographer!—you must judge. And so with a bright smile she told her husband x, y, z—reasonable choices which seemed to placate him, at least temporarily.

  Back home, in their hilltop suburban home in Beverly Farms, north of Boston, David had had little interest in photography—he hadn’t time for such an interest, or patience; on this trip, Alexis had begun to see a side of her husband she scarcely knew, that had been hidden from her until now.

  He was fifty-seven years old, Alexis was several years younger. The gap in their ages—though not considerable—had always been a determining factor in their relationship as, it is said, just a few minutes’ seniority makes a considerable difference in the intimate lives of identical twins.

  Of course in any relationship there is the more dominant individual—the one who is loved more than he can love in return. But the love of the weaker for the stronger is not inevitably a weak love. Alexis had always thought He will see, someday. He will understand how I love him.

  Ostensibly, the Italian trip was to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. But there was some other motive on David’s part, Alexis thought. He was a reticent man, you could not know what he was thinking and so often in their lives together Alexis had been quite mistaken, trying to imagine what her husband was thinking, but she felt now, in him, an almost panicked need to get away—the place to get away to only just happened to be Italy.

  Rarely had they traveled together in any ambitious way, in the years of their marriage. For David had had to travel frequently for business reasons and always he’d traveled alone, bringing his work. This trip, David had made it a point not to bring work—nor would he speak to Alexis about his work. He had wanted a new, different experience—clearly. And in the early days of their trip (of three weeks) he’d seemed happy, engaged. For travel is in essence problem-solving and David was one who liked the challenge of problem-solving even if, in travel, the problems to be solved are both transient and trivial; as, in David’s profession, he’d built a career of considerable success out of a painstaking relish for problem-solving in matters of “tax law”—a body of information continuously shifting, and requiring re-interpretation. What dismayed him about their trip was the crowdedness everywhere, that seemed to diminish the significance of travel, and the individual traveler; particularly in Rome, David was annoyed by the constant traffic—taxis, motorcycles and scooters, buses and trucks emitting clouds of exhaust—those small European automobiles that appear, to the American eye, almost like toys—“And so many tourists! And American pop culture—brainless and ubiquitous.”

  He spoke vehemently, seriously. Alexis supposed it must be a truism of travel: you are most appalled by what most resembles what you are. But she couldn’t suggest this to David, he would be hurt, or angry at her. Like all tourists, David imagined himself a traveler. He was not a mere tourist, he was not brainless for he was himself—different.

  At night, enervated from another of their late, protracted, expensive dinners, as from a carefully calibrated day of sightseeing in the mid-summer heat—(mostly by taxi, though often, inescapably, on foot—up steep stone steps, and down steep stone steps—amid packs of fellow tourists)—they were yet too over-stimulated to go to bed, despite their exhaustion; a final drink, an
d then—maybe—another drink, from the minibar, brought outside onto the balcony where in the cooling night air they found themselves gazing at the row of apartment buildings across the alley—now mostly darkened, and shuttered; above, the nighttime sky of Rome, lights reflected against a lowered cloud-ceiling; immediately below, the cobblestone street like a dark stream. From time to time they heard snatches of voices, music, laughter—shouted words, presumably in Italian—unintelligible.

  Was the language beautiful, Alexis wondered. Or was it just—foreign. Like so much of what they’d been experiencing since leaving home.

  “Another drink? Or—more ice?”

  “Both.”

  Eventually, Alexis thought, David might tell her what had propelled him to Italy—what problem in his corporate-tax-law work had proved insoluble, or whether in fact—(she did not want to think this, and had no real reason to think this)—his employer, allegedly the third-largest pharmaceutical company in the world, was suggesting early retirement for him, as for others in his division, in the wake of financial losses. In the man’s eyes the unspoken command Don’t ask! Don’t even imagine you want to know.

  It would have been a daunting task to count the rickety-looking little outdoor stairs that ascended to the multilevel rooftops across the way, or the numerous windows overlooking the alley; at first you thought that the windows were uniform, of the same general proportions, but a second glance suggested that each window was distinct from its neighbors in some small, subtle way. All of the windows were outfitted with shutters that were closed at night, and against the heat of the afternoon sun; one or two of the windows seemed always to be shuttered, Alexis had come to notice, as if no one lived inside, or harbored a secret so terrible it could not withstand the light of day. Most of the shutters were black, but some were dark brown, and a few were beige; some appeared to be recently painted, and in good repair, while others were faded and weatherworn, peeling, leprous-looking; yet, like Venice, exuding a curious quaint heartrending charm, the particular beauty of decay.